Check out this box score from a Philadelphia A’s vs. Detroit Tigers game, played on May 18, 1912 at Shibe Park. It’s your typical 24-2 blowout game, but with a twist.
If you follow the links for the Tigers’ players, you will see that for all but Billy Maharg, Hughie Jennings and Joe Sudgen, this was the one and only Major League game that any of them ever played.
That’s because they really weren’t Major League Ball Players, they were strikebreakers. But these were not like Pinkerton strikebreakers. They were more like Keystone Cops strikebreakers.
The entire Detroit Tigers team refused to take the field that day. Their star, Ty Cobb was suspended, and the other Tigers’ players were showing their solidarity with him, by not playing (three days earlier, during a game in New York, Cobb had allegedly gone into stands and roughed up a fan who been making some less than complimentary remarks about the Hall of Famer).
Among the three Tigers’ players for whom this was not their first and last appearance in a Major League game, Jennings and Sudgen were on the Tigers coaching staff.
Jennings’ Major League career, for all practical purposes, lasted from 1891 through 1902, although he did play in six games in 1903, one in 1907, two in 1909, one in 1910, the infamous 1912 strikebreaker game and one more in 1918 (at the age of 49).
Sudgen hadn’t played a Major League game since 1907, and wouldn’t play another, after this game.
Maharg’s career consisted of two games. Like most of his once-in-lifetime teammates, he played “sandlot” baseball, but he was also a professional boxer, of sorts. In 1916, Maharg, who according to Bill Lamb, was working for the Phillies as a “trainer and errand boy,” got into a game on the last day of the season. He went 0-1 and succesfully caught a ball in right field.
The most intriguing line in the boxscore among the one-and-done crew belongs to Ed Irwin. He went two for three against the A’s, with a pair of triples off of two different real Major League pitchers, Boardwalk Brown and Herb Pennock. Irwin “retired” with a “career” batting average of .667. Compared to his teammates, Irwin was definitely a ringer. He had a career, if you could call it that, playing for several teams in “low level minors” over the course of the previous decade. Irwin set a Major League record that day which still stands – most triples without any other hits.